Chain of events: a blog of Food Chain Intelligence

Water, according to the recent review of the Northern Australia Land and Water Taskforce.

Much to the chagrin of Senator Bill Heffernan (and the relief of more than one conservationist), the report indicates that only 40,000 to 60,000 hectares can be supported by irrigation with groundwater. Although only 20,000 ha are currently being irrigated and therefore the potential for growth is between 100% and 200%, this is still modest.

Notwithstanding the findings of this report, I did like the statements of Northern Territory Country Liberal Senator Nigel Scullion, who still believes agriculture can be developed in the NT. Quote:

“{..] from a Territorian’s perspective, just because it’s too hard, we certainly shouldn’t give up.”

I think that is just the attitude we need in any enterprise, particularly in the critical mission of ensuring that Australia’s food production is up to the challenge of feeding the projected population of 25.7 million by 2020.

So, what are the options?

One option proposed in the aforementioned report is the use of small-scale, widely distributed agriculture (termed “mosaic agriculture’).

But what about glasshouse production?

HAL estimates that Australia has 1,600 ha of protected cropping systems for vegetables, although AUSVEG data indicates that in 2006-07 there were 870 ha of protected crops. In any case, the protected cropping industry is growing fast, at a rate of 6% per annum. Given that the quality of products and prices meet the expectations of large retailers there is an interest in developing further this industry. It is expected that the planted area will treble by 2017 with respect to 2007 levels, particularly in SA and NSW.

Moving to glasshouse horticulture can really boost the production of some fruit and vegetable varieties, as demonstrated in South Australia. If the glasshouse locations are selected carefully, transportations distances to major markets could also be optimised, thus decreasing fuel costs (both financial and environmental).

Yes, Northern Australia does not have the Mediterranean climate of SA and there is still the issue of water. But there is a concept that is currently being tested called the SeaWater Greenhouse. The concept uses seawater to cool and humidify the air of a greenhouse and sunlight to distil fresh water from seawater.

The Seawater Greenhouse has been proposed as an alternative for sustainable provision of water for agriculture in arid, coastal regions. Operating glasshouses can be found in Oman, Abu Dhabi, and Tenerife and Gran Canaria (Spain). The Seawater Greenhouse presents interesting possibilities for Western Australia, which has the longest coastline of any state. However, some inland regions below the sea level are also potentially viable. Inland areas present lower relative humidity, which leads to greater potential for water extraction.

The overall process is extremely energy efficient. For example, 1 kW of electricity expended on pumping can remove 500 kW of heat, which offsets the costs of cooling to reach the temperatures required to grow the selected crops. Water can be produced at low energy costs (<3 kWh/m3).

Further, while viable glasshouse production units in Australia need a minimum of 1,500 sq m, the lower operating costs for the seawater greenhouse (i.e. energy and water) make smaller production areas economically feasible.

Seawater Greenhouse (Australia) Pty Ltd now has a site under contract in Port Augusta (South Australia) and is in the process of obtaining planning approval to construct the first Australian Seawater Greenhouse, which should be operational by March/April 2010.

If the results of these initial trials are positive, Government and entrepreneurs would be encouraged to look into the feasibility of this technology to increase the horticultural production in Northern Australia .

But there are other technologies that can benefit the industry and that also have potential, such as precision agriculture, robotics and others. I detail some of these technologies in the report: “Technology Platform 2: Adaptation and Mitigation Technologies”,Opportunities and challenges faced with emerging technologies in the Australian vegetable industry. Horticulture Australia Ltd pp. 1-109. This report is available through Horticulture Australia.

A note that was widely publicised last week was the quest for the perfect banana and how our obsession with this endeavour has led to waste one third of the banana crops per year. However, I beg to disagree in that consumers are the only culprits in food waste. The largest? maybe, but not the only one.

Fruit and vegetable waste can occur in several ways:

· At farm level, non-marketable fruit is either left in the field or cropped and used as animal feed. Some on-farm practices can also contribute to waste. For example, a farmer may choose not to harvest a crop in a given year because the harvesting and marketing costs are likely to be greater than the earnings.

· At retail level, there are loads of rejected produce that never see the shelves. There is also mishandling of the product before and after the product has been placed in the shelves. Losses of 2% to 23% between farm and retail and 5% to 30% at consumer level have been reported for developed countries (Kader, 2005). The International Institute of Refrigeration recently estimated that the proportion of products lost in developed countries from farm to retail is in average 15%.

· At manufacturing level, there will also be rejected fruit or unused cut fruit and vegetables. Commercial and industrial sources comprises between 10% and 15% of the 20 million tonnes of waste that ends in landfill in Australia each year. The current recycling rate for food waste is only 10%.

· At household level, the Australia Institute report “Wasteful consumption in Australia” estimated that consumers threw away $5.3 billion worth of food in 2004. Half of this value was fresh food, such as fruit and vegetables. Internationally, the percentage loss attributed to food wastage at household level is 20 to 25%, due to poor purchasing habits and poor storage practices.

· All throughout the chain, inadequate cold storage and transport also occur.

Extreme or unusual weather events can also damage a crop at the farm level. Examples include:

· In March 2006 Cyclone Larry ruined 200,000 tonnes of bananas, worth and estimated $300 million. In addition to the crop loss, the impact of Cyclone Larry on the Australian banana industry left thousands of Queenslanders out of work and caused banana prices to increase by more than 400 %. It took over two years to return to normal harvesting patterns.

· In Victoria, floods in Gippsland in 2007 affected the local supply of some vegetables and herbs (primarily broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, some lettuce and herbs) (Stewart, 2007).

· The 2009 floods in Tablelands (QLD) made transport of fruit and vegetables unfeasible through the Bruce Highway. Up to $10 million worth of fresh fruit and vegetables in cold rooms and sheds were stored in cut-off coastal areas.

· Damages to field and protected crops were also registered during the 2009 Victorian bushfires. In the Port Phillip region alone, losses attributed to the heatwave and bushfires of January and February 2009 included 50-90% of raspberry, blackberry and blueberry crops, 20-25% of orchard crops (apples and late season apricots) and 60-80% of the strawberry crop that would have been picked during March. Wine grapes were also damaged through direct fire damage and losses from radiant heat, smoke taint and ash.

So, consumer education is part of the answer. But it is far more important to understand where waste occurs and why. Data on product wastage either goes unmeasured by supply chain players or it is not analyse with a whole-of-the-chain perspective.

Following the principle of “What you can measure you can manage”, measurement of food waste and the factors that contribute to this waste is dearly needed. Waste avoidance in fruit and vegetable chains is an important factor of profitability and sustainability for the industry and it should be measured and analysed in the same way that other farm costs are.

Further, an understanding on how fruit and vegetable chains may be affected by supply chain disruptions (e.g. extreme weather events, oil prices) is also needed. Unfortunately, a potential outcome of climate change in Australia would be an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events. Therefore, strategies to predict their frequency, the types of risks involved, the consequences on production and distribution of vegetable crops and emergency plans to deal with these events are required to protect the horticulture industry. And then we have the concept of  ’peak oil’, please refer to this paper that discusses some current thinking on these aspects.

And don’t get me started with food safety that is a topic that would take another post of similar dimensions to this…or read my latest newsletter about innovation in fresh-cuts.

Recommended sources of information (most are freely available over the internet, just google the title of the report):

Oke, M., et al., Waste and recycling in Australia. 2008, Hyder Consulting. A Report Prepared for the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts p. 1-141.

Morgan, E., Fruit and vegetable consumption and waste in Australia, VicHealth, Editor. 2008. p. 1-54.

Hamilton, C., R. Deniss, and D. Baker, Wasteful consumption in Australia., in Discussion Paper Number 77. 2005, Australia Institute.

Kader, A. A. (2005), “Increasing food availability by reducing postharvest losses of fresh produce”, in Mencarelli, F. and Tonutti, P. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 5th International Postharvest Symposium, Acta Horticulturae.

International Institute of Refrigeration, The role of refrigeration in worldwide nutrition, in Bulletin 2009-3. 2009. p. 1-4.

Hennessy, K., et al., Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability., in Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. 2007, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. p. 507-540.

Note: the following reports are available from Horticulture Australia:

Estrada-Flores, S. (2009a), “Technology Platform 1: Supply Chain and Logistics”, Opportunities and challenges faced with emerging technologies in the Australian vegetable industry Horticulture Australia Ltd. pp. 1-82.

Estrada-Flores, S. (2009b), “Technology Platform 2: Adaptation and Mitigation Technologies”, Opportunities and challenges faced with emerging technologies in the Australian vegetable industry Horticulture Australia Ltd pp. 1-109.

Estrada-Flores, S. (2009c), “Technology Platform 3: Quality & Safety”, Opportunities and challenges faced with emerging technologies in the Australian vegetable industry Horticulture Australia Ltd. pp. 1-90.

“Food security and climate change are linked - sides of one coin. Each day we wake up we should be thankful for living here. No matter our circumstance, we are better off than most people. The 1 billion facing hunger and starvation and the second billion living on $2 a day represent a third of the world.”. Neil Hamilton, Professor of Law & Director of the Agricultural Law Centre, Drake University.

“Roughly around 31% of emissions come from agriculture [...] hence the impact of good policies to lessen the negative impact and good policies to increase the capacity for carbon sequestration”. Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

“Food production at high latitudes must rise as quickly as it falls elsewhere, but this is unlikely to happen. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the potential for global food production is ”very likely” to decrease above about 3 degrees. The panel uses the phrase ”very likely” to mean a probability of above 90 per cent. Unless a strong climate deal is struck soon, the probable outcome is a rise of 3 degrees or more by the end of the century”. George Monbiot, Columnist, WA Today.

“The Treasury modelling found that in 2013, the average price impact of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme on food bills will be around $68 a year — less than 1 per cent of household food bills”. Peter Garret, Environment Minister.

“The average shopping basket is about $200 a week, so the government’s modelling suggests a barely 0.5 per cent increase off the back of increases in electricity prices of 20 to 40 per cent. That is not even vaguely credible in a manufacturing industry”. Kate Carnell, Australian Food and Grocery Council.

“Many of the conflicts we see between agricultural productivity and forest conservation are largely the result of market and governance failures. We need to correct these in such a way as to achieve more optimal outcomes for society.” Francis Seymour, director general, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

“Many farmers worldwide hoped that negotiators in Copenhagen would devise a way to shield them from the heat waves, droughts, floods, and other unpredictable weather predicted under climate change, and reward them for activities that trap greenhouse gases. But agriculture wasn’t mentioned in the final accord signed December 18th by the United States, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa.” Steve Baragona, VoA News.

29th, 30th and 31st March 2010, Selwyn College, Cambridge UK

The IIR conference has registered a total of nearly 90 papers from over 20 different countries. Up to 150 people are expected to attend in this gathering which will focus on developments in the cold chain and the latest in refrigeration and air conditioning sustainability.

To give you a flavour of the range of topics, these cover performance of display cabinets, HFO refrigerants, temperature monitoring, recirculated air curtains, meat cooling, storage and transportation, carbon dioxide applications, reducing energy consumption in transport, cold storage energy use, insulation, ground source heat exchangers, adsporption cycles, micro cooling, solar cooling, electric field during freezing, air cycle, vascular perfusion, packaging and food quality, thermal insulation, super-cooled storage, cryogenic refrigerated transport, dynamic simulation, thermal conductivity of frozen foods, vacuum freeze-drying, time temperature integrators, laminar flow heat exchangers and reducing waste.

I am coordinating the workshop “Temperature control and energy efficiency in the cold chain”

The workshop starts with an introduction to the cold chain concept and its relation to energy efficiency. This course will cover:
• Innovative energy efficient systems in industrial food processing by David Pearson, Star Refrigeration, UK.
• Temperature control and energy efficiency in cold storage by Prof Don Cleland, Massey University, New Zealand.
• Mobile refrigeration including types of system, thermal performance, benchmarks and quality by Dr Silvia Estrada-Flores, Food Chain Intelligence, Australia.
• Retail refrigeration including temperature variability, performance benchmarks, energy saving features by Judith Evans, London South Bank University and R&DT, UK.
• Domestic refrigeration including temperature variability, benchmarking performance, microbiology and energy saving by Stephen James, the Grimsby Institute, UK.

The workshop will run from 9:30 to 12:30 on 31st March. I hope you include this event in your 2010 calendar!

For more information, click here.

Commercialisation Australia (CA) was announced as part of the 2009-10 Federal Budget and is a component of the Australian Government’s 10 year vision - Powering Ideas: an innovation agenda for the 21st century. The initiative has a 4-year $196 m funding, with ongoing funding of $82 m per year thereafter. CA aims to bridge the gap between the development of an Australian innovation and the transfer of this discovery to the marketplace, through the following initiatives:

􀂉 Skills and Knowledge -funding of up to $50,000 to access specialist advice and services.This component is aimed at assisting people new to commercialisation - researchers, individuals and small companies - who know their idea has commercial potential, but who don’t know what to do next.
􀂉 Experienced Executives - funding of up to $200,000 over two years (up to $100,000 per year) to engage an experienced Chief Executive Officer or other executives.
􀂉 Proof of Concept - grants between $50,000 and $250,000 to assist with testing the commercial viability of the business model or idea for a product, process or service.
􀂉 Early Stage Commercialisation - repayable grants from $250,000 to $2 million to undertake activities focusing on enabling a new product, process or service to be developed to the stage where it can be taken to market.

Funding is available to the following parties:

􀂉 A non tax-exempt company incorporated under the Corporations Act 2001;
􀂉 A researcher applying through an Australian university commercialisation office or Publicly Funded Research Agency (PFRA) commercialisation office;
􀂉 An individual applying through an eligible partner entity; or
􀂉 An individual who agrees to form a non tax-exempt company incorporated under the Corporations Act 2001 if your application to Commercialisation Australia is successful.

Commercialisation Australia is a competitive, merit based program. The program will begin accepting applications in early January 2010. Applicants need to match the grant funding on a 50:50 basis, or in an 80:20 basis (i.e. CA provides 80% of the costs) in the case of the skills & knowledge component.

Details on this program can be found here.